Archives for September 2008

Congressional leaders and the Bush administration this morning said they had struck an accord to insert the government deeply into the nation’s financial markets, agreeing to spend up to $700 billion to relieve Wall Street of troubled assets backed by faltering home mortgages.

House and Senate negotiators from both parties emerged with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. at 12:30 a.m. from a marathon session in the Capitol to announce that they had reached a tentative agreement on a proposal to give Paulson broad authority to organize one of the biggest government interventions in the private sector since the Great Depression.

Full details of the plan were not immediately available. Lawmakers said their staffs would be working through the night to assemble the package and post it on the Internet.

Top U.S. policy makers emerged from hours of tense negotiations with a clear message just after midnight Sunday morning: A deal to bailout U.S. financial markets has been agreed on and all that remains to be done is to commit the legislation to paper.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.), were flanked by key negotiators in the Capitol as they announced that a $700 billion plan to have Treasury buy up toxic assets had been all but finalized after hours of exhausting negotiations.

The funding of the Housing Trust Fund, the slush fund that feeds ACORN and La Raza, is out. You can thank House Republicans for enough obstructionism to get that result. Other changes made to the final version of the bailout, according to a source on the Hill:

Provision to provide unions and other activist groups with proxy access for corporate boards

A provision to require the government to sell to state and local governments at a discount homes the government acquires as a result of foreclosure

It also suspends mark-to-market rules and requires a study on their effects on the collapse.

Color me skeptical. I don’t believe for a moment that ACORN will go quietly into the night, and I am fully convinced that Nancy and her camarilla will do anything to sink the economy if they believe it will get them control of all the branches of government and the Treasury.

Ecuador is holding a constitutional referendum today. The Beeb touts it as Ecuador’s poor bank on referendum. In addition to lowering the voting age to 16, instituting civil marriage for gay couples, and legalizing abortion, the 444-article Constitution will

allow President Rafael Correa to seek re-election while giving him a hammerlock on the courts and the power to dissolve the legislature.

A recent European Commission report leaked earlier this month said that the EU was “losing the battle for hearts and minds” partly because of the activities of anti-EU bloggers. The recent defeat of the Lisbon Treaty in the Irish referendum led Eurocrats to study blog activity in the Republic; they concluded that Eurosceptic blogs, some by anonymous sources, outnumbered pro-treaty blogs. Of course the fact that the main Irish newspapers were overwhelmingly pro-Lisbon didn’t seem to worry them unduly.

“Blogging is also seen as an anti-establishment activity,” the report concluded, complaining that “the quality of debate has suffered” as a result of blog dissent attracting the attention of readers from TV and radio.

Bloggers anonymous and otherwise have good reason to be delighted to have proved a thorn in the EU’s side on this and other issues. The mainstream media on continental Europe is increasingly docile: Blogs offer the only real dissent in some countries. Even in Britain, where Eurosceptic newspapers enjoy a large market share, the reporting of EU issues is feeble: Dedicated Eurosceptic bloggers like Richard North spend almost as much effort correcting false Eurosceptic reporting as they do criticising the EU itself.

The results may be favoring Obama simply because more Democrats than Republicans tuned in to the debate. Of the debate-watchers questioned in this poll, 41 percent of the respondents identified themselves as Democrats, 27 percent as Republicans and 30 percent as independents.

I’m far from being a polling expert, but this is obviously a slanted poll. A 14-point split between Republican and Democrat respondents? And what percentage of those “independents” were leaners for Obama?

That’s bad enough, but the really egregious part is CNN’s blatant reportage of opinion as fact, which allowed the creation of a news story announcing Obama’s victory.

“It can be reasonably concluded, especially after accounting for the slight Democratic bias in the survey, that we witnessed a tie in Mississippi tonight,” CNN Senior Political Researcher Alan Silverleib said. “But given the direction of the campaign over the last couple of weeks, a tie translates to a win for Obama.”

Those of us fortunate enough to have paid attention during a couple of weeks of grade school math would not refer to a 41:27 ratio as “slight”. They had two Democrats for every Republican, for pity’s sake.

However, it’s CNN we’re talking about here. That kind of survey sample in favor of the Dems is their idea of “slight”.

It’s hard to guess what, exactly, the SNL skit will look like. I think the press is congealing around the (erroneous) idea that Obama won precisely because that’s what the focus groups seem to be saying, or at least what the focus groups are saying allows the press to get away with claiming Obama won (for the record I think McCain won the parts I saw, but I’ve long argued that the press mostly cares what the polls say about these sorts of events). And SNL’s instincts are, lamentably, to go with liberal conventional wisdom.

But, if I were writing the SNL skit, I would have the two candidates engage in a sympathy-for-veteran-families-and-other-noble-causes “Jewelry-off” playing on the “I have a bracelet too” comment from Obama.

To me the single most interesting statement to come out of last night’s debate, and it was easy to overlook it because it was a little subtle, showed us a titillating glimpse of the true-believing, Progressive, pink underwear that he still has under his new Alpha Male suit. It shows that he is still the elitist, socialist Alinskyite organizer for which the far left forsook Hillary. It was really just a passing turn of phrase, but I think it a very telling one. You may recall, he referred to Putin as a real “twentieth century” tyrant (or was it dictator?). He went on to say something (if any one knows where I can find a transcript of these exact words, I would be very grateful!) about how he had to be made to become a twenty-first century leader.

Aside from the ridiculous image that it brings to mind of Obama calling up Putin on the red telephone and saying, “Whoa, Dude, hold the invasion up! That was, like, sooo last century!” – it was also a great throbbing tip-off that betrayed the intentional ignorance of human nature that is so characteristic of the socialist left.

It shows that he somehow believes that there is some magical process by which “the modern world” of the twenty-first century will somehow change and evolve human nature away from susceptibility to dictatorship, totalitarianism and conquest is a dead give away that he is one of those people who has little regard or respect for the achievement of the American system of government which by acknowledging human nature and building a system of checks and balances to channel the energy and grandeur of the human spirit while protecting against the venal aspects of it.

Jane read To Be Invisible in the 21st Century, Siggy read The Soldier by Rupert Brooke (who, as Richard mentioned died of a mosquito bite), and Shiva and Zen read their own poetry. Richard recited Phillippine prison poetry in Tagalog and English,

Prior to McCain selecting Palin as his running mate, you almost never saw his name in the newspaper headlines – and if you did, it was on stories like this one, casting aspersions. But on his birthday, the day after Obama’s Temple of Denver speech, where The One thought the papers would regard him as The Only, Mac pulled the headline rug right under The One’s feet (not that Obama’s feet really touch the ground, but still) and nominated the gun-tottin’, married-to-(hot!) champion dog sledding Eskimo, mother of five, good-looking, high-heeled, motorcycle riding FEMALE governor of Alaska.

While apprasing his followers from the heights of the Mile-High City’s Temple, Obama was surely counting on two old Republican fogeys sitting on the balcony like Statler and Waldorf,

which his followers would never even look at, especially since he had an old fogey of his own for VP. Well, it wasn’t going to be Statler and Waldorf. Obama sidetracked himself into talking about lipstick on pigs:

That little remark got The One some attention, but not the right kind. The attention shifted from Obama’s halo

Along came the financial crisis, fully enabled by the Democrats and Obama’s trying to keep the media focused on him but not on the Dem’s blame; McCain in turn gives a press conference (getting valuable air time no ad campaign can buy) in all the broadcast, cable TV and radio networks and heads to Washington.

Again, the spotlight moved away from The One.

But, resourceful as he is, he bravely held stedfast in saying that he’d be at the debate tonight, no matter what. (And hoped Palin wouldn’t show up instead of McCain.) He would have that spotlight all for himself.